Telecommunications network products are services provided by telephone companies that are carried out on telecommunications networks. A widely known example is dial-1 long-distance voice service which allows a customer to dial a 1 plus a ten digit number from his or her home telephone, talk to a party who answers the telephone on the line of the ten digit number dialed, and pay for the telephone call when billed at the end of the month. Although dial-1 is popular, other calling and payment options are sometimes preferable, such as the option to make a call from a phone other than the home phone and charge the call to the home phone account using a calling card.
One such calling and payment option is debit calling which is also referred to as prepaid calling. Debit calling allows a customer to put funds in an account and have those funds debited each time a telephone call is made. Standard debit call processing includes verification of the account balance prior to connecting the call and ongoing balance verification during the call. An example of a typical debit calling customer is a parent who purchases a debit calling card for a child away from home. Such debit calling is particularly prevalent in the wireless network environment.
The invention is a method and apparatus and will be described as applied to a cellular or wireless telephone and network of the (Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) type. It should be understood however that the invention is not limited to such GSM cellular wireless network nor to telephones, but may find application elsewhere, wherever there is provision of services and/or goods which are paid for with prepaid smart cards or the like. For the GSM, a particular packet mode data transfer service GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) has been developed.
Prior art FIG. 1a shows a block diagram of principal components in the operation of the GPRS system. A packet switching controller SGSN (Serving GPRS Support Node) controls the operation of packet switching service on the cellular network side. The packet switching controller SGSN controls the sign-on and sign-off of the mobile station MS, the updating of the location of the mobile station MS and the routing of data packets to their correct destinations. The mobile station MS is connected to the base station subsystem BSS through a radio interface Um. The base station subsystem is connected to the packet switching controller SGSN through the BSS-SGSN interface Gb.
In the base station subsystem BSS, the base station BTS and the base station controller BSC have been connected to each other by a BTS-BSC interface Abis. The location of the packet switching controller SGSN in the mobile station network can vary, for example, according to which technical implementation is being used. Although in FIG. 1a, the packet switching controller SGSN has been marked outside the base station subsystem BSS, the packet switching controller SGSN can be placed, for example, as a part of the base station BTS connected to the base station subsystem BSS or as a part of the base station controller BSC.
With the various components of a conventional GPRS system of FIG. 1a now described, a more comprehensive system will now be disclosed. In particular, Prior art FIG. 1b illustrates a GPRS system including the various components discussed in FIG. 1a hereinabove, i.e. SGSN, BSS, etc., in addition to other conventional components. For example, the GPRS system of FIG. 1b includes a packet switching controller GGSN (Gateway GPRS Support Node), Home Location Registers (HLRs), Mobile Switching Centers (MSC), Gateway Mobile Services Switching Center (GMSC), Equipment Identity Register (EIR), Mobile Telephone Network (PLMN), Pilot Directory Number (PDN), Switching Center/Visitor Location Register (MSC/VLR), etc.
In addition to the above components of FIG. 1b, a billing system 100 is included for charging customers for use of the GPRS system. Traditionally, such billing system 100 interfaces with a CGF (Charging Gateway Framework) which, in turn, interfaces with the SGSN and the GGSN via a conventional interface, Ga.
The prior art billing system 100 collects information from the GPRS equipment. Such information often takes the form of call description records (CDRs). CDRs traditionally provide a record of called numbers, and a date, time, length and so on of each telephone call. In use, the approach takes the GPRS CDRs, collects them into the CDF, does some processing (such as mapping call-start with call-end) and sends the CDRs to the billing system 100. This is done for the purposes of charging for wireless network voice communication using the debit billing account.
While such billing system 100 is ideal for charging for wireless network voice communication via a debit account, problems arise when the wireless network is used for data communication utilizing Internet Protocol (IP). The billing system 100 may use the debit account only for the amount of general wireless network voice communication, and cannot be used to administer payment based on any type of IP-specific usage.
There is therefore a need for a technique of using a debit account for IP usage in a wireless network environment.